Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  In the fall of 1943, Pamela volunteered to work at the Churchill Club, an exclusive gathering place for university-educated American and Canadian officers and enlisted men in Ashburnam House, a stately old mansion behind Westminster Abbey. It was a spot, said the art historian Kenneth Clark, where high-profile Americans “could escape from the noisy bonhomie of army life” to learn about English culture. There were, indeed, plenty of concerts, lectures, and dramatic readings, but there also was considerable martini-fueled partying by Americans, many of whom were generals and other high-ranking officers. “The information you could pick up there!” marveled Time-Life correspondent Bill Walton. “Rank was abandoned at the door, and the room would be filled with generals, captains and majors, all of whom were mad for Pamela.”

  Dwight Eisenhower might have sworn off an active social life in London, but most of his subordinates declined to follow his example. Eric Sevareid observed in his journal that many high-ranking American officers “don’t want this war to end. They are making more money, living better, more comfortable, more glamorous lives than they ever did at home in peacetime.” In the novel The Americanization of Emily, whose author served as a U.S. admiral’s aide in London during the war, a British female military driver says ruefully: “The war’s just a long night out of town to the [Americans] I meet.”

  According to Kay Summersby, the top brass of the Air Force was particularly partial to having a good time. While Eisenhower relaxed at his modest country cottage outside London by playing bridge or reading Western pulp novels, the staff of General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, commander of the Eighth Air Force, threw lavish parties in the general’s suite at Claridge’s. “The Air Force had the reputation of being the glamorous service and [Spaatz’s] staff worked hard at maintaining that reputation,” Summersby observed. Walking into the Eighth Air Force headquarters at the end of the day, she said, was like “entering a crowded cocktail lounge—lots of people, lots of smoke, lots of chatter, lots of flirtations.”

  AS ONE U.S. JOURNALIST noted, flirtations and casual affairs (and some that were not so casual) were rife among Americans in wartime London: “It was the mood of the time…. Most American men who came were married but had girlfriends, and nobody cared.” Eisenhower himself had a close personal relationship with Summersby, although whether it was a full-fledged affair is still murky. When General James Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne, asked an American journalist if the gossip about a liaison between Eisenhower and Summersby was true, the correspondent replied: “Well, I have never before seen a chauffeur get out of a car and kiss the general good morning when he comes from his office.” Years afterward, Summersby recalled: “The war was an irresistible catalyst. It overwhelmed everything, forced relationships like a hothouse, so that in a matter of days one would achieve a closeness with someone that would have taken months to develop in peacetime.”

  Gavin himself had a fling with Life photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. General Robert McClure, the Allied Supreme Headquarters’s chief of information and censorship, had an affair with Mary Welsh, who was also juggling her Australian journalist husband, along with the writer Irwin Shaw, in London to work on Army propaganda films, and, starting in 1944, Ernest Hemingway. Eisenhower’s personal aide, Harry Butcher, was involved with an English Red Cross worker, whom he married after the war. David Bruce married Evangeline Bell, a twenty-five-year-old Anglo-American who worked for him at the OSS, after divorcing his first wife in 1945. The former newspaper editor Herbert Agar, in London as Winant’s assistant, also got a divorce, in order to marry Barbie Wallace, the widowed daughter of the famed British architect Edwin Lutyens. William Paley took up with Edwina Mountbatten, whose husband, Lord Mountbatten, served as supreme Allied commander in Southeast Asia at the time. Beatrice Eden, the wife of the British foreign secretary, embarked on a liaison with C. D. Jackson, a former Time Inc. executive on Eisenhower’s staff. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, she left her husband to live with Jackson in the French capital, and when the war ended, moved to New York to be with him, although the two never married.

  British commanders, for their part, observed this game of musical beds with considerable bemusement. “We did not have the same primeval need to prove our manhood that the Americans did,” sniffed one British officer, although a fair number of his colleagues eventually succumbed to temptation as well.

  Pamela Churchill had her own share of flings with well-connected Americans. “In my life,” she later observed, “I have always lived with men, for men, through men.” Neither she nor Harriman was faithful to each other, and she became involved with, among others, Jock Whitney and General Frederick Anderson, the thirty-seven-year-old head of the Eighth Air Force’s Bomber Command. According to Bill Walton, a good friend of Pamela’s, the prime minister knew about the affair with Anderson and “would question her on … [his] position on certain key bombing strategies.” She in turn would pass on to Churchill any information that she gleaned from the general. Lord Beaverbrook invited the couple for weekends at Cherkley, where he pumped Anderson for information.

  Another of Pamela’s besotted admirers was Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, the head of the British air staff. He wrote long letters to her late in the war from the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam, addressing her as “DP” (“Darling Pamela”) and declaring “I think of you many times a day and wish I could be with you.” Notwithstanding the ardor of Portal’s letters, the relationship was an innocent one, Pamela later said. “A lot of people were … in love with me who I didn’t really give the time of day to.”

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the Churchill Club opened, Harriman dropped out of Pamela’s life, reluctantly succumbing to intense pressure from Roosevelt and Hopkins to become U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. He did not want the job. Having undermined both Winant and the two previous American ambassadors in Moscow, Harriman knew how precarious and difficult an ambassador’s position could be, especially in the Soviet capital.

  In his dealings with the Soviet government, Harriman had excluded the retired admiral William Standley, who had replaced Laurence Steinhardt as the American envoy, just as he had shut out Steinhardt. Standley, who strongly believed that America should stand up to Soviet bullying, was irritated that Harriman, like other officials whom Roosevelt sent to Moscow to confer with Stalin, “follow[ed] the Rooseveltian policy: Do not antagonize the Russians [and] give them everything they want.” Years later, Harriman acknowledged that Standley, whom he and Roosevelt basically treated as an errand boy, had a point. “A large number of important people in the West, including the Prime Minister and the President, as well as some lesser lights, had the idea that they knew how to get along with Stalin,” he wrote. “I confess that I was not entirely immune to that infectious idea.”

  By mid-1943, Standley had had enough. At a press conference for American correspondents in Moscow, he accused the Soviet government of bad faith, specifically for concealing from its people the fact that virtually all of the Soviets’ military resources came from the United States and Britain. After an international furor erupted over his remarks, he resigned his post.

  Although Harriman was firmly convinced of his ability to succeed in Moscow where the others had failed, he was hesitant to leave London. His reluctance stemmed not so much from leaving Pamela, although he was fond of her, but from the fact that he no longer would be at the center of Allied action. He would lose the niche he had so painstakingly carved out for himself as conduit and buffer between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. “I am sure I can be of more use to you and the war in London than to remain in Moscow as glorified communications officer,” he wrote the president. When Roosevelt argued that the Moscow assignment was far more important, Harriman gave in, but not before insisting that if he took the job, he must have authority over all American missions and delegations in Moscow—an attempt to prevent others from doing to him what he had done to Winant and to his own predecessors in Moscow. Roosevelt agreed, and in September 1943, Harrim
an and his daughter left for the Soviet capital.

  He did not let Pamela know until the last minute that he was going. “That was a dark day,” she recalled. “When he left, it was a big, big blow.” Though she was upset by his sudden departure, it did not take her long to recover. Pamela claimed after the war that she had never thought of her relationship with Harriman as anything more than a temporary romance. “All through the war years,” she said, “it never occurred to me that Averell and I would ever get married. We never even discussed it. We never thought of it.”

  The relationship had been fun while it lasted, and it had made her financially secure: while in Moscow, Harriman continued to pay for her apartment and give her an allowance. Just as important, perhaps, his absence cleared the way for her passionate involvement with the man she later would call the love of her life—Edward R. Murrow. When Harriman left, she said, “I cried on Ed’s shoulder and ended up in bed with Ed.”

  TWO YEARS EARLIER, thanks to Kathleen Harriman, Pamela had been introduced to Murrow and other American journalists in London and had become part of their social circle. “I think she decided when Averell disappeared that Ed was the person she wanted,” Janet Murrow remarked later. On his part, there apparently was very little hesitation. “Ed was knocked off his feet by this absolutely glorious and desirable young woman,” said CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood, who had some trouble keeping his own feet under him in Pamela’s presence. “Her connections impressed him. But it wasn’t for any of those self-seeking reasons that he was attracted. She just bowled him over.”

  For both Pamela and the thirty-five-year-old Murrow, it was a startling relationship. Neither wealthy nor a man about town like most of her previous conquests, he was serious, idealistic, often withdrawn, and inclined to frequent bouts of depression. As Scribner’s magazine put it, Murrow wrapped “his privacy around him like a protective covering.” For years, his work had been at the center of his existence. Although the lean, handsome broadcaster had been pursued by more than a few women in the past, he had not previously succumbed. Somewhat naive and shy where women were concerned, he had been a rare phenomenon of virtue in live-and-let-live London.

  But his once close marriage to Janet was showing signs of serious fraying; working to the point of exhaustion, he had largely shut her out of his life since before the war began. “Ed very curt and uninterested in seeing me,” she wrote in her diary in March 1938. “I must be patient…. He has gotten out of the habit of seeing me. But it does hurt so much to call him up and have him say, ‘Is it anything important? If not, hang up.’ … Treats me like a stranger who’s bothering him.”

  At one point early in the Blitz, Murrow encouraged Janet to rent a house in the country, where she could live safely; he and his friends would join her on weekends. She went along with this arrangement for a while, but the men rarely showed up. “They didn’t want to leave the excitement of London,” she later said. She remarked in her diary: “I hate seeing Ed only at parties and with other people.” Later she wrote: “Gloomy, gloomy day by myself in the country. Couldn’t feel happy about this life at all…. Hate it.” She finally gave up the house.

  Lonely and depressed, she turned for comfort to Philip Jordan, a well-known correspondent for London’s News Chronicle and a good friend of the Murrows’, who was described by Eric Sevareid as “a lovely, suave, gentlemanly man.” Janet and Jordan fell in love, but their affair was short-lived, ending when he was sent by his paper to Moscow in July 1941. Devastated by his departure, Janet wrote, “I long for him more than I could have believed.”

  It’s not clear whether Murrow ever knew about his wife’s liaison with Jordan, but Janet certainly was aware of his affair with Pamela. Much of London, it seemed, knew about it. After evenings out with friends, the couple occasionally spent the night at her apartment or a flat that CBS rented for traveling correspondents. Pamela often accompanied Murrow late at night to Broadcasting House and sat with him in the studio while he delivered his broadcasts. “I know they used to go out into the country for walks,” Janet said after the war. “She always left something from those trips—once it was a book of poems which had her name in it. Another time it was one of Pamela’s gloves in one of Ed’s pockets.”

  Although infatuated with the prime minister’s daughter-in-law, Murrow didn’t indulge her the way her other lovers did. Revealing his conflicted feelings about wealth and social status, he seemed attracted by her aristocratic background and luxurious lifestyle while at the same time denigrating them. “Ed was very much full of complexes,” Pamela recalled. “He was always happy to remind you that … he only had hand-me-down clothes” while growing up. “He had a chip on his shoulder and was conscious that everything he had, and had done, was through his own making and by his own grit.”

  Murrow spoke disparagingly of the pampered lives led by Pamela and Harriman, whom he regarded as a calculating opportunist. “Averell,” said Pamela, “was everything that Ed thought he didn’t like—somebody born to wealth.” During the previous two years, the two men also had clashed over a number of political issues, including the controversy surrounding France and de Gaulle. Harriman had accused Murrow of being “a stooge for the Free French,” while Murrow charged Harriman with being pro-Vichy.

  As Pamela later remembered it, Murrow told her: “You’re spoiled. Everything is easy for you. You were too much adored at too tender an age, and you don’t understand what real life is.” Among her faults, he said, was her obliviousness to the hardships afflicting others less fortunate. When he showed up at her apartment one day and discovered an aide to his rival, General Anderson, dropping off a carton of steaks, he was furious. While his anger at her was certainly fueled by jealousy, he explained it away by telling her it was highly inappropriate for her to accept goods paid for by U.S. taxpayers and meant for American troops.

  Although annoyed by his criticisms, Pamela loved the fact that Murrow talked to her about weighty political and social issues, argued with her about ideas, and treated her as an intellectual equal rather than just a bedmate. “He was totally different from anybody I’d ever met,” she said. “He fascinated me, and I fascinated him, obviously.” She began pressing him hard to divorce Janet and marry her. He was tempted, although such a decision would have gone against everything he had been brought up to believe. “He loved Janet very, very much,” said a friend. “But he wanted Pam.”

  For Murrow, as for others in London, it was an exceedingly complicated time.

  * The affair between Pamela and Harriman rankled Randolph Churchill for years. At a Washington dinner party in 1961, he noted: “Averell Harriman is the man who cuckolded me when I was away in the Army—cuckolded me in the Prime Minister’s very house.” The hostess of the party asked: “But, Randolph, how many men did you cuckold when you were away in the Army?” Churchill replied: “Perhaps—but never in the house of a Prime Minister” (Schlesinger, p. 139).

  WHILE MOST OF AMERICA’S GILDED ELITE IN LONDON MERELY played at war, one of the group’s best-known members, Tommy Hitchcock, helped determine its outcome. Without Hitchcock, America’s bombing campaign against Germany might well have failed, and D-Day might have been postponed or even scrubbed. And without Gil Winant, Tommy Hitchcock probably would never have come to London.

  Hitchcock, it seemed, was the kind of man other people wanted to be. Wealthy businessmen like Averell Harriman and Jock Whitney idolized him. David Bruce called him the only perfect man he had ever met. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who modeled characters in his two best-known novels on Hitchcock, wrote that he was high “in my pantheon of heroes.”

  Before the war, Tommy Hitchcock had been the most renowned polo player in America and, arguably, the world. An international celebrity from young adulthood, he was largely responsible for turning polo into one of America’s most popular spectator sports in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, Hitchcock was to polo what Babe Ruth was to baseball and Bobby Jones was to golf, bringing energy and excitement to the game and,
according to the New York Times, “firing the American imagination” like no other polo player in history.

  Hitchcock’s marriage to a Mellon family heiress in 1928 was covered as if he were royalty. Wherever he went, he was besieged by throngs of admirers. When he arrived at a polo match, a camel’s hair coat draped over his shoulders, crowds surged around him and people applauded wildly. “There was a sort of godlike worship for Daddy,” his eldest daughter, Louise, remembered. “Mummy said it was kind of unhealthy.”

  Polo—a difficult, dangerous, and extremely expensive sport that originated in Persia before the birth of Christ—was introduced to the United States from Britain in 1876. It quickly became the favorite pastime of a number of wealthy horsemen across the country. But it wasn’t until Tommy Hitchcock got into the game that newspapers covered it as a sport of mass appeal and tens of thousands of spectators flocked to Long Island, the mecca of American polo, for international championship matches between the United States and its two main competitors—Britain and Argentina.